According to KIRO-TV in Seattle, employees of the office supply retailer allege that pressure to sell protection plans and other services has led store staffers to misdiagnose computers with viruses.

“The PC Health Check doesn’t compute,” the employee says. “If they actually did what they said and cared about customers they wouldn’t have started this program. Customers are unaware they are being taken advantage of.”

To investigate the claims, the station took six computers to various Office Depot stores in Washington and Oregon for PC Health Checks.

There technicians determined that four out of the six computers showed symptoms of malware. To fix the issues, the employees attempted to sell services costing up to $200.

The only problem? The computers were out of the box new. A second test by a unaffiliated computer security firm found no symptoms of malware and no needs for repair.

The thing that makes me stop and wonder is the "they warned them two years ago" bit. Now, there was in fact a previous time when our 'health check' program would find false malware on purpose, and we were busted for it then, and it stopped doing it. Before I was laid off, the program would not find false malware on its own and would find many common strains of real malware (such as Conduit infections).

That being said, there was still a way to make the 'new' program find 'fake' malware, and I think it's what happened in this report, and I think it's a little bit unfair that they did not mention it in said report. If you check any of the boxes at the start of the scan that ask if you're experiencing any symptoms ("My computer is running slow," "I can't connect to the internet," "My browser keeps popping up ads at me," etc), then at the end of the scan it will say that it found 'symptoms of malware'. It is very careful to say that it didn't find actual malware, just symptoms--the very same symptoms you told it you had.

Now, to the credit of the report, I too had told everyone I worked with--including management--that this was bogus and that if we wanted an honest assessment we would have to run the scan without ever touching those initial checkboxes. After all, the checkboxes are designed specifically to be overbroad so that people agree to them, and the outcome is designed to be scary both to the customer (who doesn't know any better) as well as vague to the employee (who is probably just as informed about computers as the customer). After all, the program does not tell you that the reason it found symptoms is because you checked the boxes at the start. Why would it be transparent like that?

So, what it really boils down to is this--the scanner is not really the problem. It actually does do its job. The problem is that the scanner is not only easy to misuse, it is also encouraged to misuse the scanner in order to scam customers out of their money due to overly-harsh management policies and goals. Been there, done that, saw my hours hacked and slashed because I wasn't scamming people. Pretty sure it was why I never got any promotions, despite supposedly being the shining example of what corporate says their model employee should be.

So, in closing, fuck Office Depot Office Max. May they sink into oblivion.

So, in closing, fuck Office Depot Office Max. May they sink into oblivion.

★ Now let's put those hands together & direct the same sentiment to GeekSquad/BestButt™ & screw all these Co's that charge an arm & a leg to our grandma's for a simple HDD fdisk. Old people's gotta learn to use Google ~ these "geek" squads are profiting off of Joe Schmoe's ignorance & it's kind'a sad.

★ Now let's put those hands together & direct the same sentiment to GeekSquad/BestButt™ & screw all these Co's that charge an arm & a leg to our grandma's for a simple HDD fdisk. Old people's gotta learn to use Google ~ these "geek" squads are profiting off of Joe Schmoe's ignorance & it's kind'a sad. http://idforums.net/style_images/1/icon4.gif

If you know of a retail chain that charges absurd money to run fdisk, I'd like to know about it. OD does have a data deletion service--which when I was there was $50/disk--but it wasn't just wiping the partition table and calling it a day. It actually did do a secure erase, albeit just a zero pass. Now I personally did offer to run more intense wipes if someone wanted, but after I let them know how long such a wipe would take no one took me up on the offer.

If you know of a retail chain that charges absurd money to run fdisk, I'd like to know about it. OD does have a data deletion service--which when I was there was $50/disk--but it wasn't just wiping the partition table and calling it a day. It actually did do a secure erase, albeit just a zero pass. Now I personally did offer to run more intense wipes if someone wanted, but after I let them know how long such a wipe would take no one took me up on the offer.

Imagine all the GBs of illegal material you must have removed in your time there. All sorts of stuff. You look a man in the eye and just wonder what he had to erase from existence so bad.

If you know of a retail chain that charges absurd money to run fdisk, I'd like to know about it. OD does have a data deletion service--which when I was there was $50/disk--but it wasn't just wiping the partition table and calling it a day. It actually did do a secure erase, albeit just a zero pass. Now I personally did offer to run more intense wipes if someone wanted, but after I let them know how long such a wipe would take no one took me up on the offer.

☆ Just stories from 2 friend that worked GeekSquad & hated every second they were there ~ I know absolutely nothing about hard-drive shredding and/or magnetic-disk melting; but that must be some high-grade ones & zeroes mumbo-jumbo'ing to make an HDD forget even the date it was created! *starts spreading silvering-liquid™ all over Sensation!'s linux distro*♡

QUOTE (kyonpalm @ 45 minutes, 47 seconds ago)

Imagine all the GBs of illegal material you must have removed in your time there. All sorts of stuff. You look a man in the eye and just wonder what he had to erase from existence so bad.

Imagine all the GBs of illegal material you must have removed in your time there. All sorts of stuff. You look a man in the eye and just wonder what he had to erase from existence so bad.

Actually, funnily enough, we only had about three people who took us up on the $50. One was an old couple with an ancient computer that they wanted to throw in the trash, but we convinced them to please let us at least wipe the hard drive first because DO NOT DO THIS. One was a guy who was selling his computer to a friend and wanted it wiped (yes, we made sure to tell him that there would be no OS on it anymore, he said it was fine). The last one was a business dude who wanted us to blow a hard drive away after transferring its contents to an SSD.

All of them opted to just zero the drive rather than truly securely erase it, due to time constraints, so the fact that no one wanted DoD-level erasure makes me confident that I had very little illegal material to worry my pretty little head over. That I save for the guy with state-installed malware to keep track of his online activities, and the few people who I half-jokingly suggested take a shotgun to their drive instead.

QUOTE (xiao @ 48 minutes, 11 seconds ago)

☆ Just stories from 2 friend that worked GeekSquad & hated every second they were there ~ I know absolutely nothing about hard-drive shredding and/or magnetic-disk melting; but that must be some high-grade ones & zeroes mumbo-jumbo'ing to make an HDD forget even the date it was created! *starts spreading silvering-liquid™ all over Sensation!'s linux distro*♡

Well, go ahead and tell their stories, then. 'Cause mine is that $50 gets you either every sector filled with zeroes or, if you're savvy, then every sector filled with random data several times. That's honestly not too bad considering the time involved, even if the effort level is almost zero (heh). The hard drive does not forget the date it was created, nor how long it has been active, however--this only wipes the data on the drive, not the SMART controller.

I don't make it a point to carry such things to work. Kind of a left-leaning area anyway. Instead when someone would ask me a reliable way to discard a hard drive, I would tell them that a drill press would be a good idea, or if they were the shooting type they could use it for target practice. That way I could laugh about it whether they were pro-gun or anti-gun. It's not my job to educate people about firearms when they just asked a question about hard drives.

♡Nomake my brother we could make sooo much dosh starting a blast-furnace-hard-drive-melting-business™ in the middle of Cupertino (or Los!) ~ all the Google/Apple coders are all into cheapo Mejican food ~ so we could name it something catchy like: La Cucaracha Data RAID™ -- Get it xaxa! ♫

Per-platter pricing is stupid both because the customer has no clue and you would have to pop the drive to find out. Per-drive is the only model that makes a lick of sense. But hey, you get yourself a blast furnace and I'm sure you'll find a customer base.

HOW DARE YOU. There could be children in that store! What if they overhear you talking about guns! That's a terrible influence on children, I'm never coming back to this store ever again! If you do shoot Hard disks, most likely on BLM land since most ranges wont allow you to, please clean up your mess. People trash public shooting space like you wouldn't believe.

Good riddance to office depot anyway. TBH, I assume that most big box store tech support is shady anyway.